Spirit Level by Richy Craven: A winningly daft comic novel with more than enough laughs to keep the pages turning

Hal David once wrote that what the world needs now is love, sweet love. Readers of contemporary fiction might adapt that lyric to suggest that it could also do with jokes, good jokes. Some of our best novelists, including Paul Howard, Marian Keyes and Roddy Doyle, write brilliant comic fiction and, as anyone who’s ever attended an open mic night will know, making people laugh is no easy feat.

In his debut novel, Richy Craven does not quite reach the dizzy heights of these writers, but he makes a decent stab at it. His protagonist is twentysomething Danny Hook, an assistant manager at a convenience store, whose romantic and professional lives are equally unfulfilling. After a night out at a party, he unwisely gets into a car with his drunken best friend, Nudge, and they end up at the bottom of the Grand Canal, with only one of them making it out alive.

This might not sound like the premise for a comic novel, but matters change considerably when the ghost of Nudge begins to make regular appearances in Danny’s life. Stuck in the hereafter and apparently tethered to his friend, the disoriented spectre enlists Danny’s help in trying to figure out how to move on the next plane of existence.

His encounters with various mediums are amusing, although there’s more than a hint of Whoopi Goldberg’s Oda Mae Brown in some of their deceptive behaviours, and the banter between the two friends is entertaining throughout. Craven creates a likable central character in Danny, but the fact that he can only see and communicate with Nudge after several large whiskeys weighs on the novel. Perhaps there might have been a better way to summon the spirit than through spirits themselves. And while the revival of a long-dead pub patron adds some welcome darkness to the story, it goes off the rails a little as the body count increases and more ghosts begin to appear, leading to a plot line that struggles to retain credibility.

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Still, there are no pretensions to Spirit Level, so perhaps it’s asking too much to demand logic. It’s a lighthearted read, pleasingly daft at times, and containing more than enough laughs to keep the pages turning.